Time's arrow : Perspectives for this century

Looking ahead, a terrifying perspective is portrayed, according to this abstract :

World Energy and Population

A Malthusian and despondent view of the future of humanity, where the predicted and projected energy crunch will have a cataclysmic effect on world population.

All the indices of our current historical trajectory point to an unsustainable model of the current Pax Americana construct. This is the conclusion of my own analysis of historical events, based on past references and analogies.

But the dire prediction proposed in this abstract is an extrapolation based on deterministic logic that has no past historical precedent. No other age and no other political system has resulted in such a retraction of the human race. But it is fair to say that the acceleration of population growth in the Twentieth century is an unprecedented event in itself, based essentially on intensive energy productive acceleration, in the five thousand year history of mankind. We are at a tipping point in industrial civilization today, this much is clear. The premise of this logic is irrefutable. But will the impetus of this regression trend take the human race collectively  back to a world population of one or two billion humans? It is difficult to accept, even unimaginable, that the survival instinct of humans will not correct this reversal of a magnitude unknown since the biblical legendary inundation of Noah's Arc days; the lost continent of Atlantis in tectonic eruption  or in Apocalyptical deluge.

Human endeavour and innovation have always found a way out at the price of huge sacrifice to right the wrong of civilization's meandering and destructive path, as witnessed in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, after periods of frenetic progress and population increase. Why should it be different in the 21st century?